Self-Perception and Identity 109
this effect in teleological terms, as the outcome of “unflagging...
critic[ism]” on the part of Buddhism, a criticism that ultimately
was able to stage a successful assault on Confucianism, which Gi-
mello seems to view as relatively static and impregnable.^68
In Wilson’s assessment, the genealogical genre was used as a way
to demarcate the boundaries of “orthodox” Confucian culture, to
render it impregnable from the outside, from those who were, lit-
erally, left out of its project. Gimello, on the other hand, turns this
assessment on its head by arguing that the genealogical genre, when
deployed by Buddhist outsiders, was one means by which those
outsiders staged an assault on dominant Confucian culture and, in
some ways, managed to infiltrate and affect it. Most important, it
allowed them to become “an integral part of the public order of
concept, value, and action that China’s intellectuals and men of let-
ters then called Wen and Tao, ‘Culture and the Way.’”^69
Clearly, Wilson and particularly Gimello are bordering on terri-
tory that overlaps significantly with the factors at play in Zhao’s
Genealogy. Zhao’s text can justifiably be positioned within the
genre of genealogical biographies of Confucian scholars so well
known in seventeenth-century China. Even if we use a definition
of the genre far less flexible than Wilson’s, Zhao was clearly com-
posing a genealogy. And, as Gimello demonstrates, even communi-
ties defined by the Confucian elite as standing beyond the bounda-
ries of that elite adopted the genre for their own purposes. What
makes Zhao’s Genealogy unique, however, is the fact that it does
not deal with yet another Confucian school. Rather, it aims to es-
tablish a new “school” of learning and include it within the known
classical tradition in China.
Unlike Gimello’s Buddhists, Zhao’s Muslims are not sly infiltra-
tors of Confucian culture. Rather, Zhao’s Genealogy concerns itself
with Muslim scholars engaged in the study of primarily Muslim
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68. In Gimello’s own words: “This amounts, I believe, to a kind of a fulfill-
ment of the earlier promise of Chinese Buddhism, a culmination of its gradual
process of sinicization, by which Buddhism wove itself into the fabric of Chinese
civilization while simultaneously altering the basic pattern of that fabric” (Gi-
mello, “Mārga and Culture,” p. 407 ).
69. Ibid., p. 407.